In the News

Burcin Unel, senior economist for Institute for Policy Integrity told Utility Dive the social cost of carbon was used in several of the calculations made by the NYPSC in its Track One Reforming the Energy Vision proceedings. With a social cost of carbon-based adder, “the generators’ bids reflect the external costs they impose on society,” she added. “It is technology neutral. Short-term, the price signal will impact the dispatch order. Long-term, it will drive investments that will more cost-effectively reduce carbon.”

A protracted delay in the Trump administration coming up with its own carbon-cost estimate could empower environmentalists pursuing legal challenges to mining, drilling or pipeline projects, said Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals’ rulings against the FERC “show how President Trump’s executive order withdrawing support for the social cost of carbon is misguided and shortsighted,” Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity, said in a statement. “The executive order gives federal agencies a false sense of security that they can ignore the cost of greenhouse gas emissions in their policy decisions.”

Trump’s Executive Order 13783 disbanded the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, withdrew IWG’s official valuations, and instead instructed agencies to monetize climate effects using “the best available science and economics.” Yet IWG’s estimates already are the product of the most widely peer-reviewed models and best available data.

The Institute for Policy Integrity in 2017 issued a fact sheet highlighting their conclusion that “regulations have little effect on aggregate employment or unemployment rates.” Since studies often rely upon models to predict effects on jobs, the fact sheet also emphasized that “job analysis models can easily be manipulated to predict either job losses or gains.”

The editorial board’s false alarm that coal plants will “starve” unless two Colorado mines expand into “pristine” forest deeply misunderstands the coal market, Economics 101, and climate change.

Independent agencies should mirror executive branch practices to overcome judicial scrutiny.

In several news stories this summer, administration officials have floated various strategies for how they would justify repealing the Clean Power Plan without a replacement. One strategy is to say the EPA can’t regulate carbon from existing power plants. Another approach may be arguing that the EPA can only require small tweaks to efficiency inside the plants. “I expect the first thing we’ll see when it gets published is a straight repeal,” says Richard Revesz, a Clean Air Act expert at the New York University School of Law. “Both of [these arguments] are legally weak and neither will ultimately get upheld by the courts.”

State experimentation may be the only way to break the gridlock on environmental issues that now overwhelms our national political institutions. However, without a broad mandate from the federal government to address urgent environmental problems, few red and purple states will follow California’s lead. In my view, giving too much power to the states will likely result in many states doing less, not more.

“Pruitt’s willingness to play fast and loose has helped his anti-regulatory reputation soar,” Davis Noll and Revesz write in Slate. “But the brazen deficiencies in the agency’s work exposing the hollowness of Pruitt’s ‘rule of law’ rhetoric should give Pruitt’s supporters pause. Once the judicial challenges run their course, Pruitt may be striking out a lot more.”